


Red Ink

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Cryptograms [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Emotions, Jealousy, M/M, Mental Health Issues, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 10:45:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5624245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early modern history of the young tsar bomba.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Ink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reserve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [Red Ink 红墨](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6265414) by [DisneySucks (Alucard1771)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alucard1771/pseuds/DisneySucks)



The hate was so much sometimes he felt it would eat him or burn him alive. It had texture to it and it hovered in the air like heat haze arisen from the desert floor and it was matchless and largely targetless and in it was his own being. He felt he deployed it like some tsar bomba and the fallout radiated. Everything obliterated but himself or at least in his own mind, and he felt on the good days and the bad that the blur he saw through it could not possibly be real. The hate was the most sublime feeling ever had by anyone and it subsumed. It was swallowing like quicksand. He imagined himself falling into it screaming at night upon the desert.

He was very young. He really was very very young and he was already jealous. It was the predominant and suffocating emotion of his childhood. And sometimes he imagined he knew what it was like to be jealous before he knew what it was like to be joyful. And it unwound until he was not a child, in fact he was sixteen; the other boy would have been his parents’ better son and that was how he had begun to understand it. Of course the failure was largely his very own, as Dameron was also talented in an altogether more rational way. 

He imagined himself out of some medieval narrative of the gifted and the cursed dying in Corbenic beyond the wasteland. He was sixteen. He began to focus his mind upon other things. He walked in the thick forest. And in there, to vex the narrative to nightmare, he heard a voice. 

He searched in all the databases of all the annals of memory for himself. For another alike himself in legend. Finally Dameron sat beside him on the library steps down the highway from home. It was heavy in the dusk of that world, and the sky in full fiery pink-violet glow, and the thick living forest was black, and it glowed, and it subsumed light. And Dameron said, Where are you going? 

— I’m not going anywhere. 

Beside him Poe chewed his lower lip pinker still. 

— You know how I mean. 

His warm lovely eyes. Like he did not know what chaos he wrought even then. 

— I’m not — I meant what I said. Why do you care? 

Dameron leaned in and kissed him and there was some silent part of him wholly unsurprised. When he pulled away he looked pale and like he had opened some gate to another world entirely by accident. 

He wondered if like this he could consume Dameron’s soul. But he dared not touch his mind. 

They reached again for one another in the golden dusk. 

\--

He went home. The voice from the forest was in his mind, and the darkness tidal. It ebbed and flowed with the shifting of the moon. The kissing they did furtively in the shadows. The night moved closer and the far sun moved away. On the nearest planet they were building pyramids. 

He did not know how much longer he had before the one self killed the other and on some days he was not sure of his real name. And he only remembered when Dameron said it. 

In his dreams he was held and rocked by his grandfather and then by some manlike creature crossed by snake, corpse face decaying, and when he tried to stir from the embrace he found he could not move. The voice calling for him was a whisper in his ear now. He would wake in a cold sweat when his mother knocked upon the door. 

— Honey? It’s almost time for class. 

He dreamed that he died and Dameron reanimated him unable to speak. So he could not say, I am not really alive how you think I am. He sat with his parents at dinner. And in silence he waited for the day he thought he knew was coming when he could hold it back no longer. 

When it did happen Snoke came into his mind across galaxies and possessed him utterly then removed and dropped him like a lost glove. But when he left Kylo Ren found he was still there. 

\--

To see Dameron again after so many years he remembered everything but with no feeling. The taste of his young mouth. Mechanized detail. He had pulled the memory to the front of Dameron’s mind. And he saw for Dameron it had gone altogether rather differently. 

To knock him out was like pulling a tripwire. 

He went to bed with Hux, which was becoming a deeply troubling habit. The general fucked as though he’d been taught how to do it in military school, which was fairly likely. He was fond of pulling out at the last and coming somewhere frustrating and he had a twisted sense of ego. Concurrently Ren understood himself a kind of glutton for punishment. Occasionally — driven to bend his back like so — he felt like a slut, which was a feeling he decided he liked because it was a feeling that was not the anger. 

He laid in bed afterwards while the general showered and thought about Poe Dameron. Did you do this to me, he wondered. In the mirror on the ceiling he thought he needed a scar. 

\--

Come to think of it the way Snoke fucked his brain was similar. There was no excessive preparation and thus at first for a moment there was this very good and sore expanding hurt, and then everything dissolved, and there was only rhythm. And for a moment after he did not know what was himself. And he craved that moment, inasmuch as he feared it. 

Pleasure was rational — even this. The other was not. Now and then he understood who his parents were and acknowledged the great symbology, and he saw himself shoved across a galactic chessboard by some cosmic hand, and he knelt in his study before the broken mask and prayed again for guidance, and to be delivered from temptation and restrained from disorder, and for the presence of mind to submit himself completely. 

\--

Undecipherable: 

His Force felt like the animal remaining in him uncaged. To touch it was violence. When he let it to the surface of himself he blacked out and woke in ashes. 

In fever dreams he saw his cousin for the first time in over a decade and she took up their shared ancestral arms against him, and she looked like the desert inside a woman. Her power like a vast sea of sand — like the gravity that had dragged down a graveyard of ships. And the great beasts belowground cutting their trails inside the world. 

He began to recall Dameron the way Dameron had recalled him. Neither numbness nor wistfulness nor confusion. Nor horror nor resentment nor disgust. Nor pity. Rather it was some variant of all the above. It was a feeling he decided he liked because it was a feeling that was not the anger. And meanwhile across the galaxy Dameron fell in love with someone else. 

Hux stood beside him before Snoke’s hologram in that liquid room. — I do not agree this is the best course of action. Later in the general’s chambers upon his neat black sheets carefully folded back Ren rode him, in the pressing heat, in the dark room, in the starlight through the window. I could kill him now, he thought, near the edge; I could squeeze his heart until it popped. 

Walking in the corridors he realized he did not know whether they feared him because he was great or because he was mad. But perhaps there was no distinction between madness and greatness? 

\--

After the event he slept. The chambers of a deceased officer were commandeered for his purposes and the doors were barred and someone took his saber from him while he was out. The wound upon his face had been closed with thick staples a droid tended when it brought breakfast and dinner, which he did not eat. He looked in the mirror and found himself rendered nearly how he thought he had always imagined, with a dividing mark to rival Snoke’s, a canyon abraded by his own weakness, the monogram of the dead self living somehow beyond its suicide. A parasite he carried with him in this body. He shoved his fingers down his throat until he retched. One night thereafter he woke from a dream pulling the staples from his face. When he woke again blood stuck his skin to the ruined bedsheets. 

The rest of the wounds they had cleaned and sewn and treated and the marks had begun already to fade. The droid came and cleaned him up. There was an injection to dull the pain. 

Hux came; he had been crying or something, no doubt about the loss of Starkiller. Ren faked sleep. The general stroked his hair from his forehead. 

\--

He did not imagine himself capable of tenderness. He had not since he was young.He ate himself alive but while he slept he grew back. He dreamed he died and met his father in heaven; he dreamed he died and ruled hell. He imagined he had been raised by wolves in the burning iceworld of some distant star. He bowed before the darkness in private ecstasies and within its embrace he at last felt complete. And finally he was prostrate before Snoke, who went through his wild steel-trap mind again and again nitpicking with knives for any remnant of the lightness he was supposed to have killed. 

— What would you have done if I had not found you? 

The voice was soothing. He kissed the rings and he begged for the pain to stop but it did not. He was opened to himself with lightning. Somewhere he understood he deserved it. 

\--

He woke to find Hux sitting on the window side of the bed with his head in his hands, his red hair disheveled, his skin pale in the variants of moonlight. Very old marks upon his back where himself he had been beaten as a child deep within the loamy woodlands of some backwater mining system. 

Ren fell asleep again and when he woke the general was gone. He rose and cleaned his face and dressed and put his helmet on with ceremony. And in the mirror he watched the void that was his eyes expand to encompass him entire until it trembled with his power. 

At his most lucid he remembered he had been bred for nuclear potential and longed for consummation. The young tsar bomba. In entire systems his wrath was the largest thing that ever was. Full to bursting, supercritical. He was really so very tired from all those long years of burning.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> this would not exist without [reserve](http://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve/pseuds/reserve) and her upsetting poe theories. i borrowed the title from [a deerhunter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckZmaPLfVFo) about dreaming you have died.  
> translation into chinese (!!!!!) by [alucard1771](http://archiveofourown.org/users/alucard1771/pseuds/alucard1771) available [HERE](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6265414)  
> this is part 2 of a series-to-be whose final piece is forthcoming eventually. i tag it with "red right hand" on [my tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) \- join me for mild sin


End file.
